Beep. Beep. Boop…..the system is down

Seriously! What does a person have to do to get a little internet around here?

Well, obviously, we’ve been able to find it at certain junctures in our stay here otherwise we would not be able to post here. However, it’s been a bit of a struggle to get a permanent line into our house. Finally, after much hoop jumping and unusable passwords and wrong information and miscommunication and lost deposits and…stuff, a technician from the internet company came out to our flat yesterday and “installed our internet”. And by “Installed our internet” what I really mean to say is plugged in a phone line and left a new router on our table for us to install.

Will worked in an IT office, so this didn’t initially appear that it would be a problem to do it ourselves. Will has installed many a router. Piece-o-cake. So, I left him to it and took a bath to get out of his hair. It turned out that the setup requires us to have a computer with a CD drive, which neither our tablet nor our Chromebook have. Again, this didn’t appear to be too much of an inconvenience since we could probably borrow a laptop for an hour or so from our host family so that we could install the internet software and set up the connection. We decided that would be a problem for today, so we went to bed, assuming we would figure it out today.

So, this morning, after returning from the church, we borrowed the laptop and made our merry way up to our cottage to once again attempt to set up our internet. You guessed it, it didn’t work. During the setup process, the program told us that it wasn’t connecting. Like any wise person would do when he/she has exhausted their abilities at knowing what is going on, Will called tech support. They, kindly, informed us that the CD and the installation guide included with the router were completely useless and we shouldn’t use them to try and set up the wireless in our house. “Oh!” I thought “Well, that totally makes sense because of course you wouldn’t want to use the supplies included with the package that say “installation” on them to help you install anything.” Right? Hmmm…But the best part is that they don’t know why it’s not working either.

Being at our wits end with it, we decided to sit down for a spot of tea and some crumpets (and yes, that’s totally what we did. We’re eating normal food and calling it British). After that wonderful distraction, we went back to work. And by “we” went back to work, I mean that Will is currently on the phone again trying to fix our problems with yet another IT person (I think we’re on 6 or something like that today) and I am blogging about it, borrowing internet from our host family. Hopefully we get internet in time to skype with my family tomorrow!

Meanwhile, only a few countries away there are thousands of people dying of ebola and a few kilometers away there are people dying of starvation. Clearly, life is really hard for us. (Please tell me you know that was written in jest. Nobody here gets my sense of humor and would think I am being serious)

#firstworldproblems

(this is literally the first time I have hash-tagged anything ever. I feel like I have joined the 21st century now…and that I should probably go wash it off)